The Methodist Class Meeting for the 21st Century: Who Is This For?

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by Kevin M. Watson in Accountability, Christian Living, Methodist History, Ministry, Wesley

Tags

Accountability, Christian living, class meeting, Methodism, small groups

This is the third post in a series on the contemporary relevance and practical application of the Methodist class meeting. In the first post, I gave a brief history of the origin and development of the class meeting in early Methodism. In the second post I discussed the potential contributions I believe the class meeting can make for 21st century Methodism and compared and contrasted the class meeting to Sunday school classes, small groups and accountability groups. In this post I will discuss the target audience for the 21st century class meeting.

Simply put, class meetings are designed for anyone who wants to grow closer to God. As I mentioned in the last post, they can help ensure that people do not fall through the cracks in a church. Classes also help people be self-aware of what is happening in their lives as Christians. What difference is their faith making in their life? And they provide a place for people to talk with other people who want to grow closer to God about what is happening in their life with God.

In the last post, John Meunier raised an important issue. John wrote: “Didn’t the class leader have a role that included giving advice and/or reproof as needed? It seems like that would be felt as more intense to most people today. Not as intense as the bands, but more intense than many folks want.”

As far as I can tell, John is right. I think there would be resistance to joining something like a class meeting among many people for two reasons: 1) Generally speaking, Methodists have not been in the habit of talking about their lives with God for a long time. 2) Contemporary Methodism’s desire to avoid being judgmental or condemning has led to an almost total abandonment of any real standards or expectations for its members. This was illustrated recently by, of all people, Jon Stewart who said that Methodism was like the University of Phoenix of religions, you pay $50 check “I agree” and you are saved. Stewart has perhaps given Methodism too much credit for having membership standards – because there is no cost currently associated with being a Methodist.

So, at one level people might be uncomfortable because they are being asked to talk about something they aren’t used to talking about with other people. At another level they might be uncomfortable because they are being asked to make a meaningful commitment to join together with a small group of people with the purpose of growing in their lives with God.

My response is that comfort is not the best indicator of whether or not something is good for you, or whether you need to do something.

For my first two years as a Ph.D. student, I did not take good care of my body. I did not exercise and I ate whatever sounded good. This approach was, generally speaking, very comfortable. Recently, I committed to exercise 20 minutes or more at least 3 times a week. The first time I ran (using that word very loosely!) was not comfortable, in fact it was painful. I thought I might throw up at the end of those first 20 minutes and the next day my legs were sore. I am slowly getting in better shape, but running (using that word just a bit less loosely now) is never comfortable for me.

This may not be the best example, but we could easily come up with many other examples of how comfort is not necessarily a good or accurate indicator of right or wrong, or of what is best for us.

More directly to John’s concern, in my experience people who are gifted at leading groups like class meetings are quick to listen and both cautious and sensitive about offering advice or correction. At this point, I am going to set this aside, because I plan on writing more extensively about the role of the class leader in future posts – which is what I think is primarily at issue here.

So far I have argued that the class meeting is for everyone who wants to grow closer to God, but I have also admitted that it will likely intimidate many people who sincerely desire to grow closer to God. What is the best way to address this tension?

This is a key place where pastors and lay leaders have an opportunity to challenge people to move outside of their comfort zone. An effective way to address this tension would be for the person who has the vision for starting groups like this to acknowledge that the thought of joining something like this might be a little bit scary, but that is actually a very normal reaction. One thing I have done to ease this tension is to make the first meeting more of an information session, where people will have the chance to learn more about the group, what its goals are, and why someone would benefit from being a part of it. I always stress that people who are interested, but not sure if this is for them should come, that coming to the first meeting is part of discerning whether this is for them. It is NOT a commitment to join the group. In other words, you can give people the freedom to come and learn more, without feeling like showing up means they are going to be forced to permanently join.

More importantly, anyone who is trying to start these type of groups needs to be able to make the case for why facing the fears or discomfort that will result from getting involved will more than offset the initial discomfort. If someone has been part of a group like this before, it would be very appropriate for them to share the hesitation they may have initially had to joining and then to share the ways that the group was a blessing and actually did help them grow closer to God.

Ultimately, I believe there are a significant number of Methodists who want to grow closer to God so much so that they are willing to move outside of their comfort zone and take a risk if they are convinced that the risk is likely to help them actually grow in their faith. The key, then, will be to make a persuasive case that this type of group is a key tool to that end. It might not hurt to remind them that for our spiritual ancestors, it was believed to be an indispensable tool.

What do you think? Have you been in a group like this? Did it help you grow closer to God?

If you are just joining this conversation, welcome! Please continue to feel free to ask any questions that this post may have raised for you. You can email me directly at deeplycommitted at gmail dot com or leave a comment on this post.

The Methodist Class Meeting for the 21st Century: Why Classes?

02 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by Kevin M. Watson in Accountability, Christian Living, Methodist History, Ministry, Wesley

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Accountability, class meeting, Methodism, small groups, Sunday School

This is the second post in a series on the contemporary relevance and practical application of the Methodist class meeting. In the previous post, I tried to make sure we were all on the same page by giving a brief history of the origin and development of the class meeting in early Methodism. In this post I will discuss the potential contributions I believe the class meeting can make for 21st century Methodism (or any Christians who are seeking to grow together in their faith). This post also will answer some of the questions I have received from you about the difference between the class meeting, small groups, and accountability groups.

The key contribution that the class meeting can make to contemporary Christianity is that it provides an entry point for every Christian to be in connection with one another in a way that is focused on the dynamic process of the Christian life. In general, the Christian life is a fluid process, people tend to either grow and mature in their faith or they tend to decrease in their commitment to their faith.

The class meeting is a helpful tool for increasing the likelihood that people will move forward in their faith for at least two key reasons. 1) The class meeting joins people together in small groups so that people are not lost in church. While this may seem most common or most likely in large churches, people can be “lost” in the smallest churches. In churches of almost any size, I suspect there are people who are connected with the church in some way, but who are not really known by other people in the church. This is largely unintentional, but when a church does not plan for ways to try to connect every person who is involved in the life of the church, someone is inevitably going to be left on the sidelines. The class meeting provides a structure that can connect everyone to a small group of people within the community of faith.

2) The format of the class meeting draws attention every week to the reality that the Christian life is not static. Every week each person in the class meeting is asked the simple question: “How is it with your soul?” Or, “How is your life in God?” In the classes that I have been a part of, simply getting into the rhythm of anticipating answering that question each week helps people to be more aware of how God is at work in their lives and how they are cooperating with God, or failing to cooperate with God. The content of the class meeting, then, is the lives of the people who are present. The goal of the class meeting is growth in holiness of the members of the class.

At this point, the difference between the class meeting and most Sunday school classes can be seen. To put it rather starkly, in the typical Sunday school class the content of the class is the Bible or a book of some sort. The goal is to learn new information. In my experience, people feel that a Sunday school class has been successful if at the end of the class they have learned something new, or have come to think about something in a new way.

In theory, and perhaps all too often in reality, someone could attend a Sunday school class for years, learning all kinds of information about the Bible or about Christian beliefs without growing in their faith one bit. Someone could be in a Sunday school class for years and their life with God could be worse at the end of the period of time than it was at the beginning – and it would be possible that nobody else would even know!

In the class meeting, there is no guarantee that the same person would be doing better spiritually. But they would have the opportunity to give voice to their struggles every week and the rest of the people in the group would have some idea of what was going on with them. They would be able to walk with them and pray for them.

The basic difference between the class meeting and Sunday school is that the class meeting focuses on transformation, on us becoming more and more like Christ. The Sunday school class focuses on information, on us learning information about Christ. To be fair, the intent of Sunday school is that this information will help us to live better lives as Christians. However, this is a second step, and one that often does not receive focus. I wonder if many Methodists have become so addicted to informational approaches to discipleship that they no longer think about how what they are learning is impacting the way they are living their lives.

It is difficult to provide a neat distinction between the class meeting and small groups or accountability groups, in part because the class meeting is a type of small group or accountability group. First, a class meeting is a small group, because it is a group that is small. However, a class meeting is a specific type of small group. The point here is that you can talk about a class meeting as a type of small group, but you cannot talk about all small groups as a type of class meeting. The key distinction is that in a class meeting the focus of the group must be on every person having the chance to talk about their life with God every week. If a small group gathers to read and study a book (no matter how amazing the book might be), it is not a class meeting.

Accountability groups are perhaps more similar to class meetings, in that it is generally assumed that an accountability group involves giving an account to the other people in the group. In other words, accountability groups are usually not dependent on curriculum or group study. Rather, accountability groups are oriented toward a voluntary decision to be accountable to a specific group of people for living a certain kind of life, the specifics of which are usually agreed upon by the group.

At one level, the class meeting is an accountability group. In our brief look at the class meeting in early Methodism, we saw that the class meeting was a place where people were held accountable for keeping the General Rules. And yet, at another level, the class meeting is actually a bit less intense than what most people have in mind when they think of being in an accountability group. In the early Methodist structure, the band meeting (a group of about 5 people that involved confessing specific sins) was more similar to the generally understood meaning of an accountability group.

The fact that the class meeting is a less intense form of accountability is a crucial point for understanding its potential contribution to contemporary Christianity. In most conceptions of discipleship or Christian formation, it seems to me that a combination of tools are used. There are usually classes offered that will teach people the basics of the Bible, Christian beliefs, or the particularities of the denomination of which the specific church is a part. However, what is often missing is a basic structure that will bring Christians of all levels of maturity together with the basic goal of living out their convictions.

To put it differently, most people who go to church are not willing to join an accountability group where they meet in order to tell each other the sins they have committed of which they are the most ashamed. The early Methodist approach to Christian formation recognized this and created something that was less intense so that every person could have a place where they did come together to talk at a more general and less invasive level about their life as a Christian. Methodism did not force every one of its members to confess their sins to their peers (or to anyone). However, they did require that every Methodist weekly give an account of how things were going in their walk with God.

In our context, I believe a structure similar to the class meeting would help people connect to one another. It also would help people to get into the habit of being aware of what difference the faith that they profess with their mouths is making in how they actually live their lives.

What do you think? Again, please feel free to continue asking questions about the contemporary relevance of the class meeting, or about this post in particular. You are welcomed to leave your questions as a comment, or email me directly at deeplycommitted at gmail dot com.

Successful Small Groups? Location, Location, Location

19 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by Kevin M. Watson in Book Review, Christian Living, links, Ministry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Eddie Gibbs, small groups

In a previous post, I shared a few thoughts on Eddie Gibbs’ Churchmorph: How Megatrends Are Reshaping Christian Communities. Since finishing the book, I have continued to chew on two things, a profound insight and (at least to me) a glaring oversight. These two things are unrelated enough that I think they merit their own posts. So, in this post I will lift up the insight, and in the next I will mention what I think was overlooked.

The profound insight relates to small group dynamics and is found in the following passage:

Why does the typical suburban small group not establish a spiritual relational closeness to Christ when the home-atmosphere setting is conducive to fostering a corresponding social relational closeness? Those small groups that best facilitate both kinds of relational closeness to Christ are most likely to consist of individuals whose lives intersect during the week outside of church-related activities, and in which a high level of trust has developed, allowing members to let down their guards and remove their masks. Unfortunately, with many suburban small groups the same degree of disconnect from their wider social context is evident in their group as it is in the worship service and centralized program gatherings, and they do little to foster relational closeness. Although the group members are meeting in decentralized locations, they continue to perpetuate an inwardly focused mentality. (93-94)

The insight that I find profound is the focus on interaction outside of church-related activities as important to the success of small groups in enabling people to become more like Christ. To put this in United Methodist language, Gibbs seems to be arguing that small groups will be most effective in “making disciples of Jesus Christ” when they are intentionally structured so that members lives will intersect as frequently as possible.

This has some support in early Methodism. The first class meetings were divided up based on location. So, if you were in a class meeting in London in the early 1740s, the other people in the class would have been those Methodists who lived the closest to you. In other words, early Methodists were in classes with their neighbors.

I am not certain that Gibbs’ argument is correct. However, I think it is a very interesting hypothesis, and it seems that trying to bring people together who will be most likely to interact outside of the hour that they are together worshipping and the hour they are meeting in their small group would seem to have enormous potential for making it as likely as possible that the group would become a place where people “watch over one another in love” (to use Methodist language again).

What do you think? Does this seem like a helpful insight? What are the qualities that you have found to make a small group most likely to succeed in helping people to become more like Christ?

(In the next post I will talk about my biggest disappointment with Churchmorph and why it is a cause for concern for those in the Wesleyan tradition.)